Dan Kennedy's blog on media and politics • published by the Boston Phoenix from 2002 to 2005

Friday, November 21, 2003

What did Mitt mean? We've got
answers! On Thursday, Media Log asked what Governor Mitt Romney
means when he says that same-sex marriage contradicts "3000 years of
recorded history." What paradigm-shattering event took place around
1000 BC?

The Media Log challenge attracted
an avalanche of e-mails. (Okay, five.) And I believe we have the
answer. But I'm saving that for the end.

First, we hear from J.B., who
writes: "It was the last time the Cubs and Red Sox were in the World
Series?" J.B., show some confidence. Lose the question mark! Indeed,
I thought maybe he was on to something. But it turns out that World
Series archeological records only go back to 500 BC, so scientists
can't say for sure. Still, this remains a real
possibility.

On a more serious note, J.R. sends
this along:

What don't you understand?
The human species started writing things down on parchment or
stone approximately 3000 years ago. Those are the earliest
writings we have. We have no way of knowing what happened before
that. Why are you assuming something happened in 1000 BC to change
our thoughts on marriage? What the hell does that have to do with
starting to write things down? Your question is ludicrous! What
are you ... 12?

To paraphrase Our Only President,
we will reveal our age at a time and place of our choosing. As for
the substance of J.R.'s e-mail, he is only off by a few thousand
years -- recorded history goes back to 3000-4000 BC. For more, check
this
out, from something called the Evolution
Encyclopedia.

It's safe to say that if J.B.
suffers from a self-confidence deficit, J.R. has a surplus. Perhaps
they should get together and trade.

Next up is M.P., who, judging from
his e-mail address, is a Harvard boy. Well, even Harvard types can
get it right occasionally, and it looks like he may have hit the nail
on the head. He writes:

is this a serious question
you're asking? because the answer seems obvious to me: the
reference is to the bible. what else in ancient history (and
certainly 3000 years ago, before classical greece and rome) are
people such as romney even aware of? the '3000' is merely his
rough estimate as to when the text was written or when it purports
to have occurred. of course, anyone familiar with the ancient near
east, for instance (this is my field) would know that we have
abundant records for marriages which stretch back much earlier.
[Media Log aside: Read it and weep, J.R.!]

of course, it's also true that
for the same '3000 years of recorded history' (at least in the
bible and subsequent judeo-christian tradition) homosexuality has
been considered a sin -- so romney's position on 'the necessary
civil rights and certain appropriate benefits' is itself a
'contradiction' of that history. so much for THAT tortured
logic.

In a similar vein, A.W. sends this
along:

My guess is that Gov.
Romney is referring to Biblical assertions regarding the age of
the earth, although I believe they usually declare the world is
6,000 years old, rather than three thousand.

Whenever I read or hear remarks
from people who oppose gay marriage on how it will destroy our
society, I'm always reminded of the movie "Ghostbusters".
The Mayor of New York asks the Ghostbusters what they mean
by a disaster of Biblical proportions, and they begin reeling off
the various disasters -- fire and brimstone, forty years of
darkness, the dead rising from the grave. At which point Bill
Murray declares in his most sarcastic Bill Murray voice, "Dogs and
cats, living together!"

Finally, K.S. offers
this:

I actually heard another
anti-same-sex-marriage commentator on CNN Tuesday say that the
ruling flew in the face of 5,000 years of marriage. It seems
arbitrary figures are being thrown around in an attempt to say,
"It's always been this way" in a more concrete fashion, and other
people are being far too lazy by just repeating the assertions.
The bad journalism of our times.

Bad journalism, but maybe bad
political rhetoric, too. In other words, maybe Romney talks about
"3000 years of recorded history" because it sounds good, and
because he and everyone is too lazy to think it through.

Thanksgiving hiatus. Media
Log will be on a holiday schedule until Monday, December 1. I might
post a couple of things, I might not. In any case, see you
then.

Thursday, November 20, 2003

So, Mitt, what was it that
happened in 1000 BC anyway? It seems that every time Governor
Mitt Romney opens his mouth to denounce same-sex marriage, he makes
the same observation: that the Supreme Judicial Court's ruling goes
against 3000 years of tradition.

For instance, here
is what he said on the Today show on Wednesday morning,
according to this morning's Boston Globe:

I agree with 3000 years of
recorded human history, which frankly is a contradiction of what
the majority of the Supreme Judicial Court said. Of course, at the
same time, we should [be] providing the necessary civil
rights and certain appropriate benefits.

What does this mean? What great
event happened in 1000 BC that allows Romney to refer to "3000 years
of recorded history"? He hasn't said. Yet not only is no one
questioning him, others are agreeing.

Globe columnist Adrian
Walker, who supports same-sex marriage, writes
today, "Governor Mitt Romney, who wasted no time stating his
opposition to the ruling, thundered that his position has 3,000 years
of history behind it. That's true ..."

It is? Says who? What facts can
anyone point to showing that marriage as we know it did not exist in,
say, 1200 BC, but was a thriving institution by 800 BC? What is
Romney talking about?

-- There's no sense debating
Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby on the merits of gay marriage.
He's against it, and he's not going to change his mind. Today,
though, he makes
an unsupportable assertion: that the way was paved by earlier steps
such as the Equal Rights Amendment (passed in Massachusetts, though
never made part of the US Constitution) and the state's gay-rights
law. Thus, he argues, the Goodridge decision will inevitably
lead to constitutional protections for, say, three-partner marriage,
or for incest.

That is, on its face, ridiculous.
The SJC did not base its legal reasoning in any way on those earlier
actions. What led to this week's landmark decision was not a
"slippery slope," as Jacoby contends, but, rather, a radical change
in cultural mores -- a change for the good.

I suppose it is possible that, one
day, those mores will change again to embrace polygamy,
brother-sister marriage, whatever. (I hope not.) But if it happens,
Goodridge will have absolutely nothing to do with
that.

-- Supporters of same-sex marriage
face a terrible dilemma. Marriage is now their constitutional right,
and they have every reason to insist on it, and not to let the
legislature and the governor to water it down with a civil-unions
law, as seems likely (Globe coverage here;
Herald coverage here).

Yet, if civil unions were to become
law and the SJC were to rule that they were close enough, that would
forestall the very strong possibility that the voters will pass a
constitutional amendment in 2006 that would ban same-sex marriages,
civil unions, even basic domestic-partnership rights.

Principle matters, which is why I
hope the gay and lesbian community holds out for nothing short of
full marriage. But I worry about the consequences.

Here
is an analysis of what may or may not happen on Beacon Hill by the
Phoenix's Kristen Lombardi and Susan Ryan-Vollmar.

-- Editorial round-up: the
New
York Times gives
same-sex marriage a thumbs-up; the Washington
Post is sympathetic but
muddled; the Wall
Street Journal is
against it (sub. req., but here's the lowlight: "It is four liberal
judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court who, egged on by
well-connected and politically powerful gay rights activists, have
imposed their own moral values on the rest of its citizens."); the
Los
Angeles Times is for
it, but worried about a backlash; and USA
Today, weighing in
yesterday, is dubious, and also worried about a backlash.

Yesterday, the Globe said
yes
and the Herald said no,
although it appears sympathetic to civil unions.

New in this week's
Phoenix. A new book on Howard Dean is the result of
an
unusual collaboration
between two of Vermont's most respected independent media
institutions.

Also, speculation over
what's
next at the newly downsized
Boston Herald.

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Saddam and Osama, sitting in a
tree. Q: What would be the one thing -- other than nuclear
weapons -- that would have justified the war in Iraq?

A: Real evidence of ties between
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, especially if those ties extended
to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

That's why the hot insider story in
the Washington media right now is a Weekly Standardcover
story by Stephen Hayes,
accompanied by the hyperbolic headline "Case Closed," reporting the
existence of a classified memo that concludes such ties really did
exist. The memo even revives those stories about 9/11 bomber Mohamed
Atta's supposed meeting(s) with a top Iraqi intelligence official in
Prague.

So why is this an insider story
instead of leading the nightly news? There are various theories.
Slate's Jack Shafer thinks
it's because the liberal media can't wrap their minds around
something that so contradicts their preconceived notions. Josh
Marshall argues -- on his weblog
and in his column
in the Hill -- that it's because Hayes is recycling
long-discredited crapola.

And the plot thickens. The Defense
Department has attempted to discredit Hayes's scoop, leading Hayes to
respond
on the Standard's website.

So who's right? Who knows? But
logic suggests there may be a lot less to the memo than meets the
eye.

The author of the leaked memo was
Defense Department official Douglas Feith, currently under
considerable fire for his previous efforts at exaggerating the threat
posed by Iraq. Feith, in other words, is a man with a track record,
and it's not a good one.

More important, even allowing for
the fact that the White House has to protect certain intelligence
assets, can we agree that the Bush administration would be moving
heaven and earth to get this information out there if it had any
confidence in it? After all, the Bushies are getting pounded day
after day for phonying up the case for war. Presenting convincing
evidence that Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11 would shut up a lot
of people -- just about everyone, in fact.

Instead, the last time the Dark
Lord, Dick Cheney, made such an assertion, George W. Bush felt
compelled to take
it back.

No, not every loose end has been
wrapped up. Edward Jay Epstein, writing in Slate,
asserts
that evidence of the Atta meeting in Prague has never been adequately
addressed.

Still, it's reasonable to expect
that the White House is capable of making its own best case. That it
has not only failed to embrace the Feith memo, but has actually
distanced itself from it, suggests that this is all little ado about
very little.

The Phoenix takes on
same-sex marriage. Tomorrow's Phoenix will include an
extensive package on the Supreme Judicial Court's decision to allow
same-sex couples to marry. It's
online now.

My piece argues
that the Democrats ought to get off the defensive and claim same-sex
marriage as their very own wedge issue.

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

A big day in the same-sex
marriage wars. The Associated Press reports
that the state's Supreme Judicial Court will rule at 10 a.m. in the
Goodrich same-sex marriage case.

Also known as an "outside
agitator." Not that I mind, but somehow I doubt that the
Boston Globe would refer to Ron Crews as a "transplant" in a
headline if he had come north from Georgia to fight in favor
of same-sex marriage rather than against.

The headline accompanies
this
profile by Yvonne Abraham,
who portrays the former Georgia legislator as a modernist hatemonger
-- that is, he hates lesbians and gay men, but apparently not
African-Americans, since he got in trouble with his constituents down
South when he voted against the Confederate flag.

You might also want to check out
the website
of the transplant's organization, the Massachusetts Family
Institute.

Monday, November 17, 2003

Correction.Boston
Herald publisher Pat Purcell disputes an assertion
I made last Friday, a day on which he announced the elimination of 19
jobs, that "it remains to be seen whether Purcell can now right the
ship and return his struggling paper to profitability."

"I have a bone to pick with you. We
are profitable," Purcell told me this morning, adding that the
Herald was profitable even before Friday's cuts.

Purcell declined to discuss the
numbers regarding his privately held Herald Media company.

Toward a new kind of talk
radio. Former Narco News Bulletin publisher Al Giordano
has an idiosyncratic take on efforts to launch a liberal and/or
leftist talk-radio presence. His "Talk
Radio Manifesto" is posted
at the website Salón
Chingón.

No comment today on the details of
Giordano's manifesto; that will have to wait until I've digested it a
little more thoroughly. But I do have a couple of general
comments.

First, I would love to see a
left-of-center talk show succeed, and if someone like Al Franken or
Michael Moore (or Giordano) were to host such a show, I'd certainly
give it a half-hour of my time while driving home. But I'm
skeptical.

Like it or not, liberals (as
opposed to genuine lefties) already have their own radio network --
National Public Radio. ("Gag me," writes Giordano.) The two drive-time
shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, have
about 15 million to 20 million listeners -- about the same as or a
little more than Rush
Limbaugh, the noted drug
addict who brings his special brand of hypocrisy back to the airwaves
today.

No, NPR's offerings are not
particularly liberal in content, but I would argue that's not
what most liberals are looking for. Rather, NPR's mix of news,
commentary, and cultural stories, delivered in that laid-back
monotone, appeals to liberal sensibilities (including mine). In other words, the
reason that there's never been a liberal Rush is that, if there were,
he would fall face-first into his stash of OxyContin.

It's not that liberals aren't
looking to have their politics reinforced. Certainly the success of
MoveOn.org
and Howard
Dean's website show that.
But, mostly, I suspect that talk radio appeals inherently to
conservatives and libertarians more than it does to liberals and
leftists.

But I hope Giordano -- a former
Phoenix political reporter and former talk-show host himself
-- can point the way to a new reality.

And here I always thought that
stupidity causes racism. The Boston Globe's Gareth Cook
reports
that it may be just the opposite.

Friday, November 14, 2003

Newspaper Guild statement on
Herald cuts

The Newspaper Guild of
Greater Boston is deeply saddened by the layoffs today of 2 union
members and the reclassifications of 2 others. (Three of the union
members work full-time for the Commercial Unit, and 1 worked for
the Editorial Unit as a part-time news photographer.) We will
continue diligently to represent their rehire and other
contractual rights.

We also we wish the best for the
8 veteran Guild members from the newsroom ranks who accepted
early-retirement packages. Their absences will be greatly
felt.

We remain deeply troubled that
Guild ranks at the Herald have been depleted by nearly 10 percent
in recent months through layoffs, buyouts and attrition. However,
we appreciate that Publisher Patrick J. Purcell has made sincere
efforts this week to spread the pain of staff reductions across
the board.

As a result, today is a tough
day for many of our friends and colleagues who work in jobs
outside the Guild.

All of us who love the Herald
and believe strongly in Boston's remaining a two-newspaper town
are committed to getting through this difficult time and putting
out the best paper we can.

Purcell, union president speak
out.Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell's statement just
rolled off the fax machine. It states in full:

Regrettably, it was
necessary for the Herald to reduce its workforce. This was
accomplished through employee voluntary buyouts, retirements,
attrition and the elimination of several positions.

As of Friday, 19 employees have
been impacted. Of those 19, 12 full-time newsroom employees
accepted buy-out agreements and one part-time newsroom employee
was laid off. All impacted employees received a severance
package.

A soft economy and increased
expenses have caused many in the newspaper industry to take
similar action. The Herald worked diligently to minimize the
impact on its employees by reducing expenses in other areas
throughout the company, and only after exhaustive evaluation of
all aspects of our business did this course of action become
necessary.

The 19 figure is lower than the 22
being bandied about (by, ahem, Media Log) earlier today.

Lesley Phillips, president of the
Newspaper Guild of Greater Boston and a Herald staffer, says
that 12 of her members were affected. Of them, eight had applied for
the buyout and were accepted; two, including the part-timer, were
laid off outright; and two whose positions were eliminated have
"bumping rights," which means that they could choose to leave or to
take other union jobs, a situation that would cause two other
employees with less seniority to lose their jobs.

Phillips expressed "sadness" for
those who find themselves unemployed, but also had some praise for
the Herald. "In the past 48 hours I've been convinced that
this company has done what it can to keep the impact low," she told
me. "It's just been stressful. It's been a stressful number of weeks.
We were waiting for this. Now we go forward and go on to fight
another day."

The axe comes down at One Herald
Square. Two of the Boston Herald's bigger names will be
drastically scaling back their presence, as long-anticipated cutbacks
at the city's financially ailing number-two daily are finally playing
out today.

Television columnist Monica Collins
and political columnist Wayne Woodlief have both been told that their
contracts will not be renewed. Both, however, will continue to write
for the Herald on a freelance basis. Collins will write her
Sunday "Downtown Journal" column once a week (it may be moved to the
Monday paper), and Woodlief will continue to write weekly as
well.

Although an official announcement
will not be made until later this afternoon, the word out of One
Herald Square is that 12 union employees have accepted an
early-retirement incentive known as a "buyout," and an additional 10
non-union employees -- a category that includes Collins and Woodlief
-- have been told that their positions are being
eliminated.

As of early this afternoon, word
was that not all of those who are losing their jobs had been informed
yet.

Herald spokeswoman Gwen Gage
said the paper would release a statement at 3 p.m.

Collins is expected to spend a lot
of her time on "Ask Dog Lady," a syndicated column of tongue-in-cheek
advice for dog owners that appears locally in the South End
News and the Cambridge Chronicle -- the latter owned by
Herald publisher Pat Purcell's Community Newspaper chain.
Collins also has a website, askdoglady.com.

Woodlief, at 68, is already past
the customary retirement age. Nevertheless, he says he was
"surprised" to learn that his job had been eliminated. "I've gone
through the cycles -- mad, glad; well, not glad, sad -- and in a way
I'm looking forward to some liberation, especially since I can
continue the column once a week," Woodlief told me this afternoon.
"I'll be around to haunt the politicians and afflict the comfortable
and comfort the afflicted for next year for sure, and maybe
beyond."

This has been a tumultuous year for
the Herald. In the spring, beset by declining circulation and
advertising revenues, Purcell brought in former Herald editor
(and former New York Post) publisher Ken Chandler as a
consultant, while leaving editor Andy Costello and managing editor
Andrew Gully in charge -- a confusing management scheme that has led
more than one staffer to wonder who was really running the
paper.

The Chandler-ized Herald has
been a distinctly downscale product, with a heavy emphasis on
celebrities, gossip, and scantily clad women. The early returns,
however, are mixed. The most recent circulation figures show the
paper continues its slow slide (as does the Globe), though
perhaps not quite as much as it would have were it not for Chandler's
drastic steps (see "Tabzilla
Returns," June
20).

The newsroom has been on
tenterhooks since earlier this fall, when management announced it was
seeking buyouts from union employees (see "This Just In,"
September
26 and October
3)

Of course, it remains to be seen
whether Purcell can now right the ship and return his struggling
paper to profitability. But with the bad news finally out of the way
-- until the next time, anyway -- he's given himself a chance at
least to change the subject.

Says Woodlief: "It's clearly not a
happy day. At the same time, most folks are saying, hell, it's the
Herald, we'll go on."

Thursday, November 13, 2003

This Republican filibuster is
brought to you by the Fox News Channel. "[T]he producer
wants to know will we walk in exactly at 6:02 when the show starts so
they get it live to open Brit Hume's show? Or if not, can we give
them an exact time for the walk-in start?"

A legend at 34. One fact
really caught my eye in this morning's Boston Herald coverage
of former Herald reporter Paul Corsetti, who died yesterday:
he was 54, and he left the business 20 years ago.

Corsetti was a minor newspaper
legend, going to jail rather than giving up a source and carrying a
gun after he was threatened by James "Whitey" Bulger. I'd forgotten
the details, and was fascinated to be reminded of them this morning.
But to think that he did all of this by the time he was 34.
Amazing.

The obit doesn't seem to be online,
and columnist Peter Gelzinis's tribute
is for subscribers only. Gelzinis, in particular, is in fine form,
observing that Corsetti was a hardbitten throwback to the days when
reporters reported and handed their notes off to "rewrite men," the
guys -- and they were pretty much all guys -- who stayed in the
newsroom and did the actual writing.

Gelzinis quotes Corsetti: "What I
do is get the story and hand it to you ... writers. Otherwise,
what the hell would you do all day?" (BTW, the italics are accurate,
but didn't make the transition to the Herald's
website.)

Post-post-modern Dowd.New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd today
quotes Newsweek quoting the New Yorker. Who does she
think she is? A media critic? A blogger?

No marriage, no protection: no
justice. Media Log confesses to not having followed the Rosie
O'Donnell case in microscopic detail, so maybe I should have known
this already.

But I hadn't realized that Gruner
& Jahr had been able to introduce into evidence e-mails exchanged
between O'Donnell and her partner, Kelli O'Donnell, because -- as the
Times' David Carr puts
it today -- "she was not
entitled to the same protection as a spouse."

Just another small
outrage.

Book report. If you'd like
to hear me talking about my book, Little
People, click
here
and scroll down a bit. You'll be able to listen to the interview
Here & Now's Robin Young did with me yesterday on WBUR
Radio (90.9 FM).

This morning at 11:15 a.m. I'll be
flogging Little People on the PowerNomics Radio Network with
host Tom Pope (click here
to listen); and this evening, sometime between 7:30 and 8 p.m., I'll
be on Nitebeat
with Barry Nolan, on the Comcast Network (CN8).

New in this week's
Phoenix. The real stakes over the Republicans'
phony
outcry re the leaked
Democratic memo from the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

He's here, he's queer, he can't
get not-for-profit status.Harvey
Silverglate passes along
this absurd story
from the New York Law Journal. It concerns one Christopher
Barton Benecke, who considers himself to be "gay, lesbian, bisexual
and transgender" (all four?), and who wants to obtain not-for-profit
status for a group that he founded called Queer Awareness.

It looks like it's not going to
happen. Benecke ran afoul of the language police who work for the
state of New York. They ruled that the word queer is indecent
and degrading, and therefore is banned by a state law governing the
names of not-for-profit corporations.

Thus, for Benecke, the price of
being queer includes not being able to claim tax-exempt
status.

Benecke is suing on First Amendment
grounds. Needless to say, he should win.

Dark days for the Dark Lord.Newsweek has a tough cover
story on Dick Cheney, and
how his paranoid fear-mongering within the White House helped make
possible the war in Iraq.

Even with all the weasel words,
it's not a flattering picture:

[I]t appears that
Cheney has been susceptible to "cherry-picking," embracing those
snippets of intelligence that support his dark prognosis while
discarding others that don't. He is widely regarded in the
intelligence community as an outlier, as a man who always goes for
the worst-case scenario and sometimes overlooks less alarming or
at least ambiguous signs. Top intelligence officials reject the
suggestion that Cheney has somehow bullied lower-level CIA or
Defense Intelligence Agency analysts into telling him what he
wants to hear. But they do describe the Office of the Vice
President, with its large and assertive staff, as a kind of
free-floating power base that at times brushes aside the normal
policymaking machinery under national-security adviser Condoleezza
Rice. On the road to war, Cheney in effect created a parallel
government that became the real power center.

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

Blaming Kerry. The
commentary over John Kerry's decision to fire campaign manager Jim
Jordan is all the same: it's Kerry's fault, it's the candidate not
the handler, his message is muddled, he's Gore II (a line
pushed especially hard by Jim VandeHei in this morning's
Washington Post), blah, blah, blah.

All this is true up to a point. But
consider, if you will, the possibility that Kerry's biggest problem
is that he cast a principled vote that he knew would be unpopular
with the liberal activists who control the Democratic primary
process.

I'm referring, of course, to his
decision last fall to side with the majority in authorizing George W.
Bush to go to war against Iraq. No, I wasn't happy with his vote, but
I understood it.

Everyone -- even Jacques Chirac and
Gerhard Schröder -- believed Saddam Hussein was harboring
weapons of mass destruction. Long-term UN inspections were the best
way to go, something that is even more obvious now than it was then.
But there was considerable merit to the argument that Saddam would
give the finger to the world if there weren't also a credible threat
of force coming from the US.

We didn't know then what we know
now: that Saddam's WMD capabilities were vastly overblown, aided and
abetted by Bush-administration lies over Nigerien yellowcake,
aluminum tubes, and the like. Kerry certainly doesn't want to
announce publicly that he was duped, given that almost the entire
rationale for his candidacy is his deep experience in foreign policy.
So he flounders and flops, trying desperately to explain his vote to
party activists who will never fully forgive him for having abandoned
his antiwar roots.

So perhaps the pundit who comes the
closest to explaining the dire state of Kerry's campaign this morning
is Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi, in a piece
headlined "Kerry's Irreversible Error."

Vennochi's view of Kerry's pro-Bush
vote last fall is entirely cynical, which I guess makes sense if you
believe that (1) Kerry thought he already had the Democratic
nomination sewed up and therefore (2) he was positioning himself to
peel moderate independents away from Bush in the general-election
campaign. That's a lot of presupposing.

But Vennochi gets it right when she
says:

Reversing the Kerry slide
is going to be difficult, because Kerry cannot reverse the single
biggest mistake he made as a presidential candidate: voting for
the Iraq war resolution. His vote represents the
get-tough-by-getting-to-the-middle brand of thinking that is big
in Democratic Leadership Council circles. That thinking, however,
is not popular with grass-roots Democratic activists in Iowa and
New Hampshire. It pushed them right into the arms of antiwar
candidate Howard Dean.

I don't know Kerry. I do know that
reporters who've covered him the longest don't seem to like him very
much. Yesterday ABC's "The Note" -- in a fictitious memo from Jim
Jordan to Kerry's new campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill --
called
the Globe's reporting on Kerry "the most relentlessly negative
coverage of any presidential candidate EVER by a hometown paper."
(Click here
if "The Note" has been updated by the time you read this.)

That's a bit much, and the
"Note"-sters may have been trying to reflect Jordan's views rather
than make any sort of objective assessment. But there's no doubt
the Globe has been rough on Kerry at times.

In the midst of all this cynicism
and negativity, it would be interesting if it turned out Kerry's
downfall was the result of his being too principled rather than too
calculating.

The politics of Macs versus
PCs. One would have thought it unnecessary to revisit that
less-than-penetrating question at the Rock the Vote debate over which
computers the candidates prefer.

But reader A.S.B. points me to this
absolutely hilarious account of what really happened, written by the
hapless questioner in a letter
to the Brown Daily Herald.

The link was working last night,
but it appears to be overloaded this morning. Read it if you can. If
you can't, try this
link to the
NewsMax.com site. Essentially, the student was bullied into asking
the question, and was told that if she didn't, she wouldn't get her
15 seconds of media glory.

Hilarious but also outrageous.
Shame on CNN and Rock the Vote. The debate was stupid enough without
their witless attempts to dumb it down even more.

Monday, November 10, 2003

Kill one for the Gipper.
Before the beatification
of Ronald Reagan is complete, we might want to step back and consider
his administration's involvement (somehow, the phrase his
involvement inevitably rings false) in one of the seamier
episodes of the 1980s: US support for Guatemala's right-wing death
squads.

According to this
Tim Weiner piece in this
morning's New York Times, the worst possible outcome has been
avoided -- that is, former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt,
a butcher (and born-again Christian!) trained at the notorious School
of the Americas, did not make the runoff.

James S. Henry has written
an
excellent overview of how
the Reagan White House supported right-wing terrorism in Guatemala,
which claimed nearly all of the 200,000 lives that were lost during
that violent time. After crediting Jimmy Carter with substantially
reducing assistance to the butchers of Guatemala, Henry
writes:

But when Ronald Reagan
took office in January 1981, the old public policy of mutual
understanding and back-scratching returned. Indeed, Deputy White
House Chief of Staff Michael Deaver's LA/DC- based PR firm, Deaver
and Hannaford, was hired by the junta's cronies, a substantial
amount of Guatemalan money reportedly found its way to the Reagan
war chest, and sanctions against US arms purchases
disappeared.

Meanwhile, NPR yesterday ran one of
the most bizarre stories you're ever likely to hear. Apparently a
major issue in the Guatemalan election campaign is the demand for
back pay by former members of the right-wing death
squads.

Hypocritic oath. Let's get
this straight. George W. Bush, just as he did in the 2000 campaign,
has opted out of the public campaign-finance system.

Howard Dean knows he can't keep up
with Bush unless he follows suit. So, according to John Kerry, Dean
has gone over to the dark side.

Kerry on Dean: "I'm disappointed
that Governor Dean has taken a very different road than Democrats
have stood for as a matter of principle."

But Kerry knows he can't keep up
with Dean unless he opts out of the public system. So that's
exactly what he intends to do later this week. Kerry, though, wants
us to know that his reformist credentials are intact.

Kerry on Kerry: "We're going to
make our decision over the course of the next day or so. Now, whether
I will or not, I'll make that decision. But I'm prepared to.... I've
always said if any Democrat decides not to live by it, then I think,
within the universe of Democrats, we have to make our
decisions."

Whether you like what they're doing
or not, the truth is that Dean and Kerry are doing precisely the same
thing for precisely the same reason.

Friday, November 07, 2003

More on that so-called Iraqi
peace offer.New York Times reporter James Risen and Iraq
expert Ken Pollack were on CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown
last night, chewing over Risen's story on a
last-minute peace overture
that appeared to have Saddam Hussein's blessing.

Maybe there's more to tell, but it
sounds like this is going nowhere. Pollack -- a prowar ex-Clinton
official -- was dubious in the extreme, saying, "There is no reason
to believe that Iraqi intelligence had any intention of delivering on
any of the promises that they were dangling in front of the United
States. Far more likely what they were trying to do was to derail
the US war effort without actually giving up anything."

And Risen himself made no great
claims for his story, other than to assert that it was accurate. For
instance:

I think, as Ken said, you
know, you can't get into the mind of Saddam Hussein very easily.
It's quite possible this was all, that he wasn't really serious
about this. All I'm saying in my reporting is that this happened.
This channel happened....

So, I'm convinced that Habbush
met with Hage, that Hage then met with Richard Perle, that Perle
then talked to the CIA. I'm not trying to say that this was real
or that Saddam Hussein was serious. I'm just saying this channel
happened.

Josh Marshall has a
different take on the whole
thing, arguing that the story was a setup by the neocons to help one
of their own -- Michael Maloof, who also figures in the story, and
who lost his security clearance earlier this year.

Marshall is very astute, but also a
bit too cynical for Media Log's tastes, given that he seems to think
that if you can speculate on the motive, you can dismiss the
story.

On the other hand, Pollack's and
Risen's comments were pretty convincing that there is a wisp of smoke
here, but no fire.

Divide and conquer.New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman today reminds
us of how the Republicans
have used the Confederate flag to advance their interests in the
South.

And the Boston Globe's Mary
Leonard reports that the GOP is salivating
over the prospect of making same-sex marriage an issue in the 2004
campaign.

Thursday, November 06, 2003

"At least they could have talked
to them." As Bob Somerby might say, I have no idea how
serious Iraq's last-minute attempt to avoid war really was. Nor do I
have any idea how US officials were supposed to differentiate this
one from the dozens of other back-channel communications they claim
they were receiving.

But the account
of this approach, by James Risen in today's New York Times, is
depressing nevertheless. Because the one thing we do know is
that Saddam's go-betweens were telling the truth when they claimed
Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction.

Read these two paragraphs and weep.
Hassan al-Obeidi was a top Iraqi intelligence official, and Imad Hage
was a Lebanese-American businessman who met with him, and who tried
to persuade the Americans to take the initiative
seriously.

Mr. Obeidi told Mr. Hage
that Iraq would make deals to avoid war, including helping in the
Mideast peace process. "He said, if this is about oil, we will
talk about U.S. oil concessions," Mr. Hage recalled. "If it is
about the peace process, then we can talk. If this is about
weapons of mass destruction, let the Americans send over their
people. There are no weapons of mass destruction."

But no. All of this had to be
ignored, because the White House had already decided that the
invasion would take place.

Not to denigrate what has been
accomplished. Though Saddam's WMD capability -- pumped up by
Bush-administration lies -- has been disproven, can we all agree that
we've learned the savagery of Saddam's government was even worse than
we knew?

Still, we're in a mess, and we
don't know how to get out of it. As if to emphasize the poignancy of
the lost opportunity Risen describes, three more pieces in today's
Times report that 43,000 reserves and National Guard troops
are to be called
up; that a soldier has been
accused of cowardice
-- not good if true, but you can't help but feel sympathetic for the
guy; and on GIs wounded
in last weekend's helicopter attack.

War is horrible even when
necessary. It is an unspeakable crime when it can be
avoided.

Cash and carry. Howard Dean
is probably doing what's necessary if he walks away from the broken
public-financing system. If he doesn't, and if he then wins the
nomination, he's going to get creamed by George W. Bush.

That's why even pro-reform groups
such as Common Cause appear ready to give Dean a pass, as Dan Balz
and Thomas Edsall report
in today's Washington Post.

Still, this is treacherous
territory for Dean. How do you make the case that you're a different
kind of Democrat, and then turn around and raise money like Bill
Clinton? (Clinton, who did abide by public financing, raised
zillions in soft money through a loophole that was closed by
McCain-Feingold.)

An editorial
in today's Albany Times-Union is indicative of what Dean can
look forward to:

Going for broke also would
further expose one of Mr. Dean's glaring weaknesses. It would be
perhaps his most serious contradiction of a prior position yet.
For Mr. Dean, the self-proclaimed advocate of campaign finance
reform, running for president as a big money candidate would
amount to hypocrisy.

For Democrats, the most appealing
aspect of Dean's candidacy is that he appears to be willing to do
whatever it takes to win. But he can't afford to look like a
hypocrite.

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Stars, bars, and Howard
Dean. I taped last night's "Rock
the Vote" debate while I
was out. Naturally, I screwed up somehow, and missed the first
half-hour, when all the fireworks took place over Howard Dean's
earlier comment that he "want[s] to be the candidate for guys
with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks."

But I caught the exchange between
him and Al Sharpton in the post-debate wrap-up. In any case, that
particular dust-up now appears to have been chewed over
sufficiently.

Here
is the Boston Globe report, by Patrick Healy and Joanna Weiss.
Chris Suellentrop has a good analysis
in Slate this morning on how Dean boneheadedly turned this
into a bigger deal than it should have been. And the Boston
Herald's David Guarino caught
up with Sekou Dilday, who
initially popped the question, and who now says he's decided not to
support Dean.

So here's what I'm mad about. At
one point, a 20-year-old student asked the candidates to describe who
they were when they were 20. It was a good question, the sort that
I'd have liked to hear all eight candidates answer.

But moderator Anderson Cooper, who
must have been told to keep things moving no matter what, cut it off
after only Dennis Kucinich, Wesley Clark, Dean, and Joe Lieberman had
answered. (John Kerry must have been eating his heart out, but he
managed to work in the Vietnam stuff later.)

Good move, Coop! The next question
was from a Tufts kid, who asked Carol Moseley Braun about --
AmeriCorps. "I think AmeriCorps is important. I think public
service is important," Moseley Braun began, sucking all semblance of
life out of my TV set.

And so it went. There were moments
when the debate veered toward being the best Democratic forum yet.
But it was too disjointed, and Cooper -- a white-haired 36-year-old
whom CNN has designated as its youth magnet -- was all too eager to
contribute to the disjointedness.

For instance, Kerry -- criticized
for that photo
of him hunting pheasants the other day -- joked, "It's a tough
economy now, and it's amazing what you have to do to put food on the
table." He then turned it around, blasting Dean for wooing and
winning the support of the National Rifle Association. "You want an
assault weapon? Join the Army," Kerry said.

Dean responded by saying he
supports the assault-weapons ban. But when Kerry tried to challenge
him, Cooper wouldn't let him.

Kerry's most idiotic moment came
when he was asked about polls that show Hillary Clinton would lead
the entire pack of Democrats by a wide margin if she were to jump
into the race. "I saw a poll the other day that showed me 15 points
ahead of her," Kerry replied. Citation, Senator?

The weirdest performance of the
evening came from Kucinich, but that was no surprise. He and Clark
looked like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in their black ensembles;
perhaps they're auditioning for MiB III. Kucinich was wearing
orange make-up, and toward the end -- waving his arms and shouting
out a five-point plan for something or other -- he looked positively
bug-eyed and unhinged. Kucinich's video
did have the best music, though.

Clark seemed sharper and more
assertive than he has since his shaky start, but he still can't
answer a simple question. Asked about lesbian and gay rights, he
seemed to support letting homosexuals serve openly in the military,
but then backed away. Afterwards, CNN's Paula Zahn asked him to
clarify his "blurred line" on don't ask/don't tell.

"I don't think there are any lines
blurred there, Paula," he replied, and then blurred things even more:
"We have a policy that may be working or may not be working." The
rest of his answer continued in a similar vein.

The funniest line of the evening
(also no surprise) came from the Reverend Al Sharpton. When asked
what his first thought would be upon moving into the White House, he
replied, "Well, I think the first thing going through my head will be
to make sure that Bush has all his stuff out."

But maybe the most effective line
-- to get back to the Confederate-flag flap -- was from John Edwards,
the Southerner who's trying to appeal to the Bubba vote. "I drive a
pickup truck," he told Zahn, "but I've got an American flag in the
back."

Presidential pix online.
NPR's All Things Considered yesterday had a nice piece on
Diana Walker, a former Time magazine photographer who
photographed presidents and their families for more than two
decades.

If, like me, you heard the piece
and wanted to see the photos, click
here.

You say "art," I say, "So what?"
Q: What do you call a docu-drama that gets canceled? A: A step in
the right direction.

I simply cannot get excited over
the fact that CBS has decide to yank its controversial, fictitious
treatment of the Reagans. Yes, it's disturbing -- as the New York
Times reports today
-- that CBS knuckled under to a concerted campaign by top-level
Republicans. I have no doubt that Sumner Redstone and Mel Karmazin
were, uh, gently reminded of regulatory and legislative issues that
could have a serious effect on their immensely profitable
enterprise.

But then I saw this quote from
Barbra Streisand, wife of faux-Reagan James Brolin: "Indeed, today
marks a sad day for artistic freedom -- one of the most important
elements of an open and democratic society."

Good grief. As Madonna once
explained to Ted Koppel, "It's like my art, ya know?"

Come on down. I'll be
reading from Little
People today at noon in
The Studio, in Northeastern University's Curry Student Center. If
you're in the neighborhood, stop on by.

Tuesday, November 04, 2003

"Fair and balanced" debunked --
by a conservative. Fox News fans who actually buy into Roger
Ailes's "fair and balanced" crapola ought to get themselves over to
the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com.

Yesterday the site republished a
long piece from City Journal written by one Brian C. Anderson,
who glowingly sings the praises of the Fox News Channel because --
get this, Roger -- it's unapologetically
conservative.

Writes
Anderson: "Watch Fox for
just a few hours and you encounter a conservative presence unlike
anything on TV." Naturally, Anderson thinks this enables Fox to do
better journalism than its so-called liberal competitors, which is a
dubious proposition. But it's refreshing to see someone on the other
side acknowledge simple reality.

Anderson doesn't stop there. He
praises South Park for its allegedly conservative sensibility
-- he's absolutely rhapsodic over segments that depict the rain
forest as smelling "like ass," and that make fun of Native
Americans.

And he engages in the absolutely
loathsome practice of attributing to liberals views that are held
only by a few seriously demented extremists.

For instance, he points to a
South Park encounter with the North American Man-Boy Love
Association (NAMBLA) as somehow saying something important --
importantly bad, that is -- about liberals. He writes of
NAMBLA:

One of the contemporary
left's most extreme (and, to conservatives, objectionable)
strategies is its effort to draw the mantle of civil liberties
over behavior once deemed criminal, pathological or immoral
...

Of course, Anderson offers not a
whit of proof that any real liberal would "draw the mantle of civil
liberties" over the behavior that NAMBLA advocates, as opposed
to letting the organization simply talk about it, which is a very
different thing. Then again, the First Amendment isn't all that big
with the right these days, so it's perhaps too much to expect
Anderson to make such fine distinctions.

Anderson also lets Matt Welch
assert, without challenge, that he started his weblog right after
9/11 "in direct response to reading five days' worth of outrageous
bullshit in the media from people like Noam Chomsky and Robert
Jensen."

Yes, it's true that Chomsky and
Jensen are members of the hard left. Like virtually every liberal I
know, I was deeply offended by Chomsky's blithe blame-it-on-the-US
attitude following the terrorist attacks.

But Welch -- and, by extension,
Anderson -- would lead one to believe that Chomsky was perched at the
right (okay, left) hand of Howell Raines during those days and weeks
of 24/7 coverage. In fact, you'd have to scour the websites of, say,
CounterPunch
and the Nation
to find any unmediated Chomsky. And even the Nation's editors
felt compelled to balance Chomsky with erstwhile lefty war hawk
Christopher Hitchens. For the most part, the public was introduced to
Chomsky's views by pundits who quoted him for the sole purpose of
attacking him.

As for Jensen, I couldn't even
remember who he was until I Googled him this morning.
Here
is his home page. As I
recall, he nearly lost his job for speaking out, and was saved only
by an old-fashioned idea called academic freedom.

Toward the end, Anderson cites
Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam's attack on bloggers last
year (sorry, can't find it online) as an example of elite liberal
bias. Beam is certainly an elitist, as I'm sure he would be the first
to attest; but he's actually a conservative, in an elitist,
old-fashioned sort of way.

Ultimately Anderson's piece is
well-written, well-argued, and silly. It sounds good, but it falls
apart when you examine the faulty premises on which it
rests.

But he's right about one thing: Fox
News is as fair and balanced as the Wall Street Journal's
editorial page.

About Media Log Archives

The Boston Phoenix's Media Log was launched in 2002 by the paper's then-media columnist, Dan Kennedy, who continued it until he left the paper in 2005. The Phoenix's current media columnist, Adam Reilly, is now the author of Media Log, which has since been renamed Don't Quote Me. Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, blogs at Media Nation.